DDR5 RAM Price Index: Dated $/GB from Direct US Retailers (Pilot)

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-08-12 · ~5 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The short version

DDR5 prices roughly tripled during the 2026 memory supply crisis, and the numbers that circulate are mostly screenshots without dates or methods. This page is the start of a dated, checkable record: a $/GB index for mainstream 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5 kits observed at named direct US retailers only, with the method, the acceptance rules, every rejection reason, and the raw data published alongside the numbers.

It is labeled a pilot because the index metric has an activation gate it has not passed yet — and rather than loosen the rules to manufacture a number, the gate status is printed here verbatim.

First capture (2026-08-12)

21 qualifying offers total across 3 kits, out of 546 listings reviewed. For historical scale, the Vengeance 6000 CL30 kit was a $95–110 street-price part through 2024 — the price history lives in the DDR5 buying guide — so the first capture’s cheapest accepted observation was roughly 4x that older range.

The next four successful captures held the same narrow model coverage. August 13 produced 26 eligible offers, August 14 produced 24, August 15 produced 30, and August 16 produced 29 — always across the same three Corsair kit lines, with the cheapest qualifying offer still $449.99. No August 17 capture landed.

The August 18 capture reviewed 583 listings and accepted 25 offers across the same three models. The cheapest qualifying offer moved to $459.99 at B&H, or $14.375 per GB. That is a real $10 move in the discovery set, but still not a broad market index: nine of the 12 tracked kit lines produced no row that cleared the public rules.

Six more daily captures followed. August 19 reviewed 590 listings and accepted 24, August 20 reviewed 616 and accepted 24, August 21 reviewed 680 and accepted 21, August 22 reviewed 624 and accepted 17, August 23 reviewed 716 and accepted 16, and August 24 reviewed 706 and accepted 16. The same three Corsair lines qualified every day. No fourth model line has produced a single qualifying row. Twelve captures in, that is still the whole story.

The $459.99 floor held for six days and then ended on August 24, though not in the way a price chart would suggest. The B&H listing behind that figure simply left the result set. Of the 13 listings present on both August 23 and August 24, not one changed price. The new cheapest qualifying offer is $469.59 ($14.675/GB), a Corsair Vengeance RGB kit at Best Buy that was absent from the previous day’s set. The shelf changed. No seller repriced anything.

That new leader carries a flag this page records rather than quietly fixes. Its model number is CMH32GX5M2B6000C38 — a CL38 kit — while the line it satisfies is labelled CL30. The second-cheapest RGB row is a C36 part. The line’s actual CL30 kits all sit at $619.99. So the tracked line is mixing timings, and as of today the headline figure is set by the loosest of them. This is the same defect class as the RGB contamination corrected on August 21: a listing satisfying a line it should not. It is not corrected here, and no history was rewritten.

August 22 was the first capture with the plain Corsair Vengeance line free of RGB-titled listings, after the collector began rejecting excluded tokens. August 23 repeated it. August 24 made three. All seven of that line’s rows are non-RGB, and its cheapest clean offer has held at $479.99 ($15.00/GB) at Central Computers on the same listing for all three days. That is the figure the 2026-08-21 correction identified as the line’s true non-RGB price. One capture showed the filter ran. Three show it holds. The lines price independently now, and no longer share a listing.

Every qualifying observation, latest capture

The most recent successful capture’s full qualifying set, exactly as the collector recorded it — not just the cheapest row per kit.

Rendered at build time from the raw CSV — the table and the download can never disagree.

Gate status, verbatim: 6 of 12 tracked kits produced qualifying offers on 2026-09-04, from 560 listings reviewed and 24 eligible offers; the index metric (median cheapest $/GB across kits) activates at 6, so it is open at exactly the minimum and a fourth index row was written. One line fewer and this page would show no row at all. The margin is one kit. The cheapest qualifying offer is $489.99 at B&H ($15.312/GB, plain Corsair Vengeance). Stock is still not confirmed at the listing page. Every observation row continues to carry verification_status: discovery_only, and publish_ready stays False.

No capture ran on 2026-09-03. This row follows 2026-09-02 by two days, so every comparison below spans a two-day gap rather than a night. A price observation is timestamped. It cannot be recovered after the fact, so that day is absent from the series rather than interpolated.

The median fell 8.8 percent while the floor rose. Median cheapest $/GB went from $17.125 to $15.625, yet the minimum rose from $14.675 to $15.312. Both numbers describe the same six kits. Nothing here got broadly cheaper. Both movements are the arithmetic of a shrinking basket that lost its expensive tail.

Yesterday’s prediction was tested, and it held. The 2026-09-02 entry argued that Trident Z5 RGB 6400’s 21.4 percent jump was shopfront attribution rather than a price move. It has now round-tripped on the identical manufacturer part F5-6400J3239G16GX2-TZ5K: Newegg $609.99 on August 30 and September 1, Best Buy $740.69 on September 2, and back to Newegg $609.99 today, to the cent. A kit does not rise 21 percent and fall 18 percent in two days. The shelf moved twice. The recorded price followed it. That is the clearest evidence this series has produced that its own headline number can be moved by attribution alone.

The largest apparent drop is a specification substitution. G.Skill Ripjaws S5 shows $595.99 falling to $499.99, down 16.1 percent. It is a different kit. Every prior capture of that line matched part F5-6000J3040F16GX2-RS5W, where J3040 encodes CL30. Today’s cheapest match is F5-6000J3636F16GX2-RS5K, where J3636 encodes CL36. That is a looser-timing part satisfying a line this page labels CL30. That is the same defect class first flagged on 2026-08-24, when a CL38 Vengeance kit set the headline figure. It is recorded rather than corrected. No history was rewritten.

Both cheap lines rose. Plain Corsair Vengeance went $479.99 to $489.99, up 2.1 percent, moving Central Computers to B&H. Corsair Vengeance RGB went $469.59 to $499.99, up 6.5 percent, moving Best Buy to Newegg. The part changed again too, CMH32GX5M2B6000C38 (CL38) to CMH32GX5M2E6000C36W (CL36, white). Corsair Dominator Titanium held $649.99 at Newegg to the cent. G.Skill Flare X5 held $499.99 to the cent while moving Newegg to Best Buy. Two lines held. Four did not.

Two lines left the pool, and they were mid-basket and high. G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo ($619.99) and TeamGroup T-Force Delta RGB ($499.99) both stopped surfacing. Neither was repriced. Their departure takes the basket from eight lines to six. With the expensive tail gone the median lands on a cluster. Three of today’s six kits sit at exactly $499.99, so $15.625 is a three-way tie rather than a distribution.

Read four captures together, because the pattern is now the finding. On August 31 the median fell while nothing got cheaper. On September 1 it held while a tracked kit rose 20 percent. On September 2 it rose 7.5 percent while three kits held flat and one fell 17 percent. Today it fell 8.8 percent while both cheap lines rose and the floor went up. Four captures, four different ways for one headline number to misdescribe its own basket. That is why this page prints the gate, the basket and every rejection beside the figure, and why publish_ready is still False.

Why it opened on 2026-08-30, stated plainly: the rule changed, not the market. The gate had failed on all thirteen captures from 2026-08-12 to 2026-08-29, reaching 3 of 12 and then 4 of 12. On 2026-08-29 the module-split matcher was corrected (method ram-usd-per-gb-discovery-v1 to v2): it had accepted the marketing phrase “dual channel” as a statement of the 2x16 split while rejecting manufacturer part numbers that encode the same fact, such as G.Skill’s F5-6000J3636F16GX2-FX5, where 16GX2 means 16GB x 2. That is the manufacturer’s own encoding and is strictly more authoritative than the title prose, so refusing it was an inconsistency in what counted as explicit. Three G.Skill lines qualified as a direct result and the model count moved 4 to 7. The bare word “Kit” was deliberately NOT accepted, because a “32GB kit” does not state its module count. Every series row carries its method_version, so v1 and v2 days are never silently compared.

What gets rejected, and why that’s the point

Of 546 listings reviewed in the first capture, 525 were rejected, each with recorded reasons: marketplace and third-party sellers (the largest bucket), listings that don’t state the 32GB capacity or the 2x16GB split in the title, wrong speed for the tracked SKU, used/renewed condition, and prices outside a sanity band. A price index built on listings a script guessed about would be smoother — and worthless. The rejection log ships with the dataset.

Method, exactly

Captures run against Google Shopping (US, English) via DataForSEO’s merchant API, one exact-model query per tracked kit. An offer qualifies only if the seller matches a named direct-retailer allowlist (Best Buy, Newegg, B&H, Micro Center, Adorama, Walmart first-party, and peers — marketplace suffixes excluded), the title states the exact kit line, speed, 32GB capacity, and 2x16GB split (a “Dual Channel” declaration on a 32GB listing counts as the split), condition is new, and the USD price sits inside a $60–900 band. The band’s ceiling was raised from $500 on day one when real direct-retailer offers at $469–499 for the cheapest kit proved the old ceiling was written for a market that no longer exists — that correction is recorded in the change log, not hidden.

Amazon is excluded by design (see FAQ). The full collector, product basket, tests, raw responses, and rejection logs are in the site’s repository.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

Download the latest observations: ram-price-observations.csv — one row per qualifying offer, with capture date, kit, price, $/GB, seller, and verification status. The activation gate opened on 2026-08-30, so the daily index series now publishes at ram-price-index.csv (median cheapest $/GB across kits, one row per UTC day, each row stamped with the method_version that produced it). License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — attribute as “TechFuelHQ DDR5 RAM Price Index” linking to this page.

The same CSV is mirrored on Kaggle for discovery and reuse. This page remains canonical because it carries the gate state, method changes, and correction history beside the file.

Context for the crisis itself: the RAM & SSD price crisis explainer and the DDR5 buying guide — the guide’s price-tracking data is what earned this site its first external news citation, and this index is that work made repeatable.

Change log

• 1.0.4 (2026-09-04) — eighteenth capture: 560 listings reviewed, 24 eligible offers, 6 of 12 model lines, gate open at exactly the minimum. Fourth index row: median $15.625 per GB, min $15.312, max $20.312, median cheapest kit $499.99. No capture ran on 2026-09-03, so this row follows 09-02 by two days and the gap is stated rather than interpolated. The median fell 8.8 percent while the floor rose. Trident Z5 RGB round-tripped to $609.99 at Newegg on the identical part, confirming the 09-02 entry’s shopfront-attribution reading. The largest apparent drop, Ripjaws S5 down 16.1 percent, is a CL30-to-CL36 part substitution rather than a discount. Both cheap lines rose. Two lines left the pool and three of the remaining six sit at exactly $499.99, so the median is a three-way tie. publish_ready stays False.
• 1.0.3 (2026-09-02) — seventeenth capture: 560 listings reviewed, 24 eligible offers, 8 of 12 model lines, gate open a second day. Third index row: median $17.125 per GB, min $14.675, max $23.147, median cheapest kit $547.99. The median rose 7.5 percent while three lines held flat to the cent, one fell 16.8 percent and a new cheaper eighth line joined; without that new line the median would have been $18.625. Two G.Skill parts swapped retailers in opposite directions at a spread of roughly 20 percent. The floor rose to $469.59 on the CL38-in-a-CL30-line listing first flagged on 2026-08-24. publish_ready stays False.
• 1.0.2 (2026-09-01) — sixteenth capture: 718 listings reviewed, 25 eligible offers, 7 of 12 model lines, gate reopened. Second index row: median $15.937 per GB, min $14.375, max $22.373, median cheapest kit $509.99. Median, minimum and median kit price all returned to the cent to their 2026-08-30 values while G.Skill Ripjaws S5 rose 20.1 percent on the identical part — the move sat at the top of the distribution, where the median could not see it. This entry was written on 2026-09-02; the 09-01 commit bumped dataset_version to 1.0.2 without recording the release here, the same omission corrected for 1.0.0 one day earlier.
• 1.0.1 (2026-08-31) — fifteenth capture: 680 listings reviewed, 21 eligible offers, 5 of 12 model lines. The activation gate closed again one day after opening, and no index row was written. Same method (v2) on both days, so the rule-change caveat that framed the opening does not apply here. Two lines left the set and none joined, both of them the most expensive (Ripjaws S5 $595.99, Trident Z5 RGB 6400 $609.99, both Newegg). Four of the five surviving lines held price to the cent. The fifth changed seller at a steady price. Cheapest qualifying offer unchanged at $459.99 / $14.375 per GB, Vengeance RGB at B&H. The median $/GB fell from $15.937 to $15.625 with no kit getting cheaper. That is a basket-composition artefact, recorded rather than presented as a move in price.
• 1.0.0 (2026-08-30) — fourteenth capture and the first published index row: 680 listings reviewed, 21 eligible offers, 7 of 12 model lines against a minimum of 6, so the activation gate opened for the first time. Median cheapest $15.937 per GB, min $14.375, max $20.312, median cheapest kit $509.99, method ram-usd-per-gb-discovery-v2. It opened because the acceptance rule changed rather than because supply improved: the module-split matcher was widened on 2026-08-29 to read manufacturer part numbers such as F5-6000J3636F16GX2-FX5, which qualified three G.Skill lines and moved the count from 4 to 7. publish_ready stays False, because direct-retailer stock is still unconfirmed. This entry was written on 2026-08-31; the 08-30 commit bumped dataset_version to 1.0.0 without recording the release here.
• 0.9.7 (2026-08-24) — twelfth capture: 706 listings reviewed, 16 eligible offers, the same 3 of 12 model lines. The $459.99 run ended after six days when its B&H listing left the result set. Nothing was repriced. Zero of the 13 listings common to Aug 23 and Aug 24 changed price. New cheapest qualifying offer $469.59 / $14.675 per GB, Vengeance RGB at Best Buy. New flag, recorded not corrected: that listing is a CL38 part (CMH32GX5M2B6000C38) satisfying a line labelled CL30, whose true CL30 kits sit at $619.99. Plain Vengeance clean for a third capture, flat at $479.99 / $15.00 per GB. The activation gate stays closed at 3 of 6 required lines.
• 0.9.6 (2026-08-23) — eleventh capture: 716 listings reviewed, 16 eligible offers, the same 3 of 12 model lines, cheapest qualifying offer flat at $459.99 / $14.375 per GB for a sixth day since Aug 18. The RGB exclusion reproduced on the plain Vengeance line: 0 of 7 rows RGB-titled, holding independently at $479.99 / $15.00 per GB on the same Central Computers listing as Aug 22. The activation gate stays closed at 3 of 6 required model lines.
• 0.9.5 (2026-08-22) — tenth capture: 624 listings reviewed, 17 eligible offers, the same 3 of 12 model lines, cheapest qualifying offer flat at $459.99 / $14.375 per GB since Aug 18. First capture with the RGB exclusion active on the plain Vengeance line: 0 of its 9 rows are RGB-titled (5 of 13 were on Aug 21), and it now prices independently at $479.99 / $15.00 per GB. The activation gate stays closed at 3 of 6 required model lines.
• 0.9.4 (2026-08-21) — captures seven through nine (Aug 19: 590 reviewed / 24 eligible; Aug 20: 616 / 24; Aug 21: 680 / 21), the same 3 of 12 model lines, cheapest qualifying offer flat at $459.99 / $14.375 per GB since Aug 18. Correction: the page prose was resynced to the capture the rendered table serves. The drift class the 0.9.2 entry named had recurred, because the daily collector updates the CSV but not this page.
• 0.9.3 (2026-08-18) — sixth successful capture: 583 listings reviewed, 25 eligible offers, the same 3 of 12 qualifying model lines, and a new discovery-stage floor of $459.99 / $14.375 per GB at B&H. The activation gate remains closed; no ram-price-index.csv row was manufactured.
• 0.9.2 (2026-08-14) — day-three capture (24 qualifying offers, same 3 Corsair kits, cheapest unchanged at $449.99). Correction: the rendered observation table had advanced to the 2026-08-14 capture while the prose above it still described only days one and two, so a reader met a table dated later than anything the page acknowledged. The prose now names the capture the table actually serves.
• 0.9.1 (2026-08-13) — day-two capture (581 reviewed / 23 qualifying / 3 kits, cheapest unchanged). The page now renders the full qualifying observation table straight from the raw CSV at build time, so the visible table and the download can never disagree.
• 0.9.0 (2026-08-12) — pilot capture and method publication. Four method corrections made against measured evidence on day one, all recorded: price ceiling $500 → $900 (285 real listings died on the stale band); “Dual Channel” accepted as an explicit module-split marker (Newegg writes Trident Z5 Neo kits this way); per-product offer de-duplication (a Corsair offer was being consumed and mis-rejected under another kit’s query); basket v1.1 swapped two kits with zero direct-retailer presence (ADATA XPG Lancer, Patriot Viper Venom) for Dominator Titanium 6000 and Flare X5 5600.